Sparks: Coherence as an Abstract Type

In The Fifth IEEE International Workshop on Object-Orientation in Operating Systems (IWOOS ‘96), Oct 1996.

Pete Keleher


Abstract:
We are currently designing Sparks, a protocol construction library that we hope will allow us to improve the performance of DSM systems to within a few percent of tightly-coupled multiprocessors. Sparks' abstractions will allow us to cleanly and systematically explore the design space of high-level synchronization operations, rather than proposing and implementing new operations in an ad hoc fashion.

Sparks' basic abstraction is the coherence history, an object that summarizes past coherence actions to shared segments. Our emphasis here is more on creating and investigating the abstractions that make a broad variety of optimizations possible, rather than on the individual optimizations themselves. However, we will thoroughly quantify the performance gains allowed by the synchronization types created via the Sparks library.

@inProceedings{keleher96,
	title = "Sparks: Coherence as an Abstract Type",
	author = "Pete Keleher",
	booktitle = {The Fifth IEEE International Workshop on Object-Orientation in Operating Systems (IWOOS ‘96)},
	month = {Oct},
	year = {1996},
}

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